By Alfred Uhry. Directed by Mario Crudo. And Arts Club Theatre Company production. At the Granville Island Stage on Wednesday, February 19. Continues until March 15

Time in the theatre is precious. Why is the Arts Club wasting it with Driving Miss Daisy? First produced in 1987, Alfred Uhry’s script is no longer very useful—at least not in Vancouver.

Uhry tells the story of 72-year-old Daisy Werthan, whose son Boolie forces her to get a chauffeur when she totals her Packard. Daisy is white and Jewish. Hoke, the chauffeur, is black. We’re in Atlanta and the play spans the years 1948 to 1973, so race is a huge issue. But we know where this is going: Daisy and Hoke will develop what publicists and sentimentalists love to call “an unlikely friendship”.

Especially in 2014, Daisy’s cultural distance flatters West Coast Canadian liberals while pretending to challenge us. “Isn’t American racism horrible?” it encourages us to say. “Aren’t we glad we’re superior?”

Director Mario Crudo’s production doesn’t help. If you watch the 1989 film, you’ll marvel at the subtlety and dignity that its stars, Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy, bring to the essentially sentimental material. But subtlety is in short supply here.

Nicola Lipman, who takes the role of Daisy, is a charming performer, and she has fun with this script’s comic rhythms, but she oversimplifies its emotional content, leaning too heavily into Daisy’s crankiness, for instance, and diminishes the character. And Toronto actor John Campbell bangs away at a repetitive cadence that makes Hoke sound like an idiot. Brian Linds’s Boolie is much more successful: the combination of love and frustration that this Boolie feels for his mother produces a tender and touching weariness.

Still, almost nothing surprises. In this context, the play is conservative. The production choices are predictable. Watching Driving Miss Daisy, I felt like I was stuck in a dusty old box.